Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 265

As a result, he thinks we should reassess our commonly held attitudes about
moral responsibility. At the same time, he argues that much of what would
appear to be threatened can be rescued, in particular the aspirations we have for
achievement and meaning.

11.3. No- Free-Will- Either-Way Theories

By contrast with Spinoza and Honderich, many contemporary free will skeptics
are agnostic about causal determinism, but contend that free will skepticism is
reasonable on either deterministic or indeterministic presuppositions.
Some free will skeptics argue that free will is in fact impossible independ-
ently of the truth of determinism or of indeterminism. Most prominently, Galen
Strawson contends, by way of his Basic Argument, that moral responsibility—
“ultimate responsibility”—requires a conception of agency that human beings
could not satisfy, and its impossibility for us can be established independently of
an examination of the truth of determinism (1986: 25–60; 1994). Strawson, then,
is a no- free-will- either-way theorist, that is, he maintains that for us moral
responsibility is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism. We
discussed Strawson’s Basic Argument in Section 7.2, labeling it an impossibilist
version of the Ultimacy Argument. We first review it briefly here for ease of dis-
cussion, and then highlight additional features and particular objections.
Again, the core idea of the Basic Argument can be expressed as follows.
When an agent acts, she acts because of the way she is. But to be morally
responsible for acting, the agent must then be morally responsible for the way
she is, at least in key mental respects. But if an agent is to be morally responsible
for the way she is in those key mental respects, she must be responsible for the
way she is that resulted in those mental respects. This reasoning generates a
regress, which indicates that finite beings like us can never satisfy the conditions
on moral responsibility. The conclusion is that finite agents like us can never be
morally responsible for acting.
An interesting variant of this argument begins with the premise that actions
for which an agent is free in the sense required for moral responsibility must
have a full causal explanation in terms of her reasons alone. More precisely,
such action must be rational, and rational actions must have an explanation in
terms of reasons the agent has that indicates all of what there was about the
agent, mentally speaking, that causally brought it about that she performed the
action she did (Strawson, 1986: 52–6). But how do the reasons that the agent has
themselves arise? If they arise non- rationally, then the action is “rationally
speaking random.” If the reasons resulted from choices that are based on further
reasons, the same questions could be asked about them. There can be no infinite
regress of reasons, and consequently, actions must always be “rationally speak-
ing random,” and thus unfree.
Randolph Clarke (2005) contests Strawson’s claim that moral responsibility
requires that the agent be in rational control of all the mental factors that con-
tribute to the action. Suppose we’re created as agent- causal libertarian beings,